Ernest Rutherford Research Paper

Ernest Rutherford was an English born physicist who went on to discover and advance our world in many different ways. These incredible feats of his lifetime earned him the prestigious Nobel Prize award for chemistry in 1908. Ernest was born on August 30, 1871 in Spring Grove, New Zealand and he died on October 19, 1937, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. Rutherford was said to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (who is known to be one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century). Rutherford was well-known for his limitless reserves of energy and enthusiasm, which left a number of his workers exhausted. In summer 1900, two years after moving to Montreal, Rutherford sailed for New Zealand to marry Mary Georgina Newton, whom he had become engaged to while living in Christchurch. They had one child, Eileen Mary, born in 1901. When Eileen was 20 she married the respected physicist Ralph H. Fowler. Eileen died in 1930, nine days after giving birth to her fourth child. Rutherford and his wife outlived their daughter, leaving them to take special care of their grandchildren (Nobel,2014).

His father was a farmer, originally from Scotland, and his mother was a

Finding hydrogen produced in the nuclear reaction above, Rutherford began to suspect that the hydrogen nucleus may actually be a fundamental particle, a building block of all atomic nuclei. Then in 1920 he formalized his theory by giving this particle a name: the proton. He found that unless some neutral particle were added to the nucleus, the repulsion of the positively charged protons would cause nuclei to fly apart. In 1920 he named this hypothetical particle the neutron. James Chadwick, Rutherford’s Assistant Director of Research, discovered the neutron in 1932, proving its existence by experiment (Nobel,